I've been the Associate Director, Acting Director, and now Co-Director of the Program on Urban Studies since the fall of 2003; I'm also a senior lecturer in Sociology. 

I teach both introductory and upper-level courses in Urban Studies, and courses on the history of American cities, including:

• URBANST 110, Introduction to Urban Studies
• URBANST 150, From Gold Rush to Google Bus: History of San Francisco
• URBANST 141, Gentrification
• URBANST 203, Urban Studies Senior Seminar 

I enjoy teaching in Urban Studies because the students are excited to connect their classroom work to real issues in the cities and towns they live in and care about.  I also love the interdisciplinary nature of Urban Studies; all of us who teach in the program bring our own disciplinary perspectives, and students are able to draw on these multiple viewpoints to understand cities in original and sophisticated ways.  My own discipline is history.  I majored in history as an undergraduate at Yale and went on to get a PhD in history at the University of Pennsylvania.  My dissertation was about streets and street life in Philadelphia around the turn of the twentieth century.

Download my CV here.

Recent publications:

“Jewish Girls’ Street Peddling in Gilded Age Philadelphia: Ethnic Niche, Family Strategy, and Sexual Danger,” Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth 12:3 (Fall 2019): 374-392. DOI: 10.1353/hcy.2019.0041 (HTML) (pdf)

“Reading Whiskey Gulch: The Meanings of Space and Urban Redevelopment in East Palo Alto,” Occasion, vol. 8 (August 2015), special issue on Race, Space, and Scale ed. Wendy Cheng and Rashad Shabazz. (HTML) (pdf)

“The Risk of Cholera and the Reform of Urban Space: Philadelphia, 1893,” Geographical Review 103:4 (2013): 517-536. (Enhanced HTML) (pdf)

“There are Plenty of Women on the Street”: The Landscape of Commercial Sex in Progressive-Era Philadelphia,” Historical Geography 40 (2012): 39-60. (HTML) (pdf)

“Mapping Vice in Early Twentieth-Century Philadelphia,” Spatial History Project, Stanford University.